LiQUiFY Magazine December 2014 | Page 71

way it would just silt up ht, like a Main Beach or k, you know where you hthanders out the back gutter - it’ll just do that” If Straddie was destroyed as a surf break, would it put pressure on other breaks with hundreds of surfers being forced to perhaps pile in their cars and say head to Burleigh or Currumbin even? “Firstly there’s no parking (laughs), yet the Gold Coast is promoted as a ‘surf scene’ and the northern beaches are a high icon area of our surfing. They’ve kind of disregarded that, and they just look at Snapper and all that, and push the Quiksilver Pro and Surfing Queensland bullshit all down the southern end, but the northern end is really iconic and gee ... I mean we’ve already lost the seaway, but if South Straddie went it would be devastating to that end of the coast.” Do you think the consortium and developers can truly understand how dynamic and powerful the ocean is around that area? “I don’t know if these engineers have actually looked at it, and when this place first started, there were guys getting barrels, I mean there’s 8 to 10 foot waves right fucken there, you know what I mean? I don’t think they realise all of that.” And how about that crazy wave in the seaway, you know a lot of people still don’t know about it, how was it when it broke for the few first years of the seaway? “It would kind of come in and hit about three quarters out along the groyne on the northern side, and then break for about a third of the length of the wall, but the good thing about it was that it would break on a kind of angle where it was coming back at you, and we always imagined it was kind of like the Bowl, when it started to barrel it had the Ala Moana thing. A lot of times it was a big fathander, but a lot of times too, you’d get the right day and the right guys could possibly source out a barrel. I was lucky enough to get a few on that day (of the cover shot). LiQUiFY | 71